Monday, January 19, 2004

Online porn in a new light

This week's issue of Time is all about sex. One of the articles is entitled The Porn factor, and it contains this amazing statistic:

According to a 2001 online survey of 7,037 adults, two-thirds of those who visit websites with sexual content say their Internet activities haven't affected their level of sexual activity with their partners, though three-quarters report masturbating while online.

Masturbating online... It is difficult to imagine, especially tens of millions of people doing it, but if it's in Time magazine it must be true.

A recent MSNBC.com survey found that as many as 80 percent of visitors to sex sites were spending so much time tracking down erotica on the computer that they were putting their real-life relationships and/or jobs at risk.

"Tracking down erotica", apparently, was not the only thing they were spending so much time on.

"It's an enormous business ... There's a lot of money to be made," said Sean Kaldor, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings, which estimated that 34 million visited porn sites in August -- about one in four Internet users in the United States.

75% of 34 million is 25 million people masturbating online.

All of this helps to explain something that is happening in Las Vegas. I was there last week, and on many street corners you find people handing out little cards the size of baseball cards that look like this:

This is one of the tame ones. On the back of the card it says:

24 HOURS 7 DAYS
FULL SERVICE
"ADULT"
ENTERTAINMENT

TOTALLY NUDE

DIRECT TO YOU IN YOUR ROOM
IN 20 MINUTES OR LESS

1 GIRL FOR $40 - 2 GIRLS FOR $80
OR 3 GIRLS FOR $99

GUARANTEED
SATISFACTION!!

These cards are literally everywhere along The Strip in Las Vegas -- Not only are people handing them out, but you find them stuck in the holes of chain links fences, arrayed along the tops of bushes, littering the streets, etc.

The men and women handing these cards out look like normal people. One woman was handing them out at a crosswalk at noon with several cops nearby directing traffic. She looked to be in her 50s or 60s. Her comment was, "Hey, it's a job."

At another corner I had to wait for the light to change, and several guys were handing out cards. I asked one of them, "How does this work?" He said, "You want one girl, forty dollars. You want two girls, 80 dollars. You want pussy pussy, maybe 100 dollars. They come right to your room. Only takes 20 minutes."

So... if you want to consider online porn to be the "gateway drug", then this is one place where the gateway leads. It will be interesting to see if this "house call" phenomenon spreads outside of Las Vegas.

The conclusion of the Time article is: "As such incidents multiply, more Americans -- parents especially -- may come to Chandler's conclusion: We have to turn off the porn."